Raveesh Meena

Automatic Detection of Miscommunication in Spoken Dialogue Systems

In this paper, we present a data-driven approach for detecting instances of miscommunication in dialogue system interactions. A range of generic features that are both automatically extractable and manually annotated were used to train two models for online detection and one for offline analysis. Online detection could be used to raise the error awareness of the system, whereas offline detection could be used by a system designer to identify potential flaws in the dialogue design. In experimental evaluations on system logs from three different dialogue systems that vary in their dialogue strategy, the proposed models performed substantially better than the majority class baseline models.

Crowdsourcing Street-level Geographic Information Using a Spoken Dialogue System

We present a technique for crowd-sourcing street-level geographic information using spoken natural language. In particular, we are interested in obtaining first-person-view information about what can be seen from different positions in the city. This information can then for example be used for pedestrian routing services. The approach has been tested in the lab using a fully implemented spoken dialogue system, and is showing promising results.

Root Cause Analysis of Miscommunication Hotspots in Spoken Dialogue Systems.

A major challenge in Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS) is the detection of problematic communication (hotspots), as well as the classification of these hotspots into different types (root cause analysi ...

Automatic turn segmentation for Movie & TV subtitles

Movie and TV subtitles contain large amounts of conversational material, but lack an explicit turn structure. This paper present a data-driven approach to the segmentation of subtitles into dialogue turns. Training data is first extracted by aligning subtitles with transcripts in order to obtain speaker labels. This data is then used to build a classifier whose task is to determine whether two consecutive sentences are part of the same dialogue turn. The approach relies on linguistic, visual and timing features extracted from the subtitles themselves and does not require access to the audiovisual material - although speaker diarization can be exploited when audio data is available. The approach also exploits alignments with related subtitles in other languages to further improve the classification performance. The classifier achieves an accuracy of 78 % on a held-out test set. A follow-up annotation experiment demonstrates that this task is also difficult for human annotators.